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ilex  ·  1398 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: “Is that your Bible?”

I'm going to start working on a longer post on this because I've recently started a conversation with one of my sisters and it's drawn out some memories I hadn't seen in a while and it would be good to have those saved while I can still recall them.

It's a lot to talk about because, as you said, it's a whole worldview, and unwinding one of those that you were exclusively exposed to as a kid is not a short process. It's been a decade and I'm still not really done. And it touches on some quite personal details, so there will be parts you'll just have to take me at my word for.

But, the really short version is: I moved away to college, which gave me a social and institutional structure that wasn't tied to church and family. My parents had heavily tied the truth of young earth creationism with the truth of christianity, and learning physics and biology disabused me of the former, so I felt that the latter was maybe suspect too. By dint of making woman, queer, and non-white friends I narrowly avoided falling into New Atheism or alt-lite libertarianism (although it certainly did help that those groups tended to fall for some of the same conservative fallacies I was by that point quite allergic to).

Ironically, the christian groups I grew up in pay lip service to a lot of good ideals; perhaps my saving grace was that I took those ideals a bit more seriously than everyone around me.